Eternal Fire
by Lady Jade Scribbler
Summary: Iris Potter didn't ask for the events that occurred during what was supposed to be a nice trip to Seattle. Immortality was something she never thought of for herself. But she would soon discover that her new life paralleled her old in more ways than one. Hadn't she left her ragtag army days behind her? Apparently not. Playing a dangerous game, Iris hopes she doesn't get burned.


A/N:

Hello all! I know it, yet another story. I just have so many plot bunnies…

I'm sure that readers of my HP/PJO fics aren't going to be happy about the fact that I'm posting something so different on here. But I needed to give myself a bit of a break from those. I've been totally stressing myself out over them lately. But they ARE my next priority. I'm currently totally reworking Daughter of Lightning and working on the next chapter of Figure on the Ice. Just wait.

Really, I'm not the biggest fan of Twilight. But this little plunny bit me on the bum and refused to let go until I transformed it into words. Though I'm not a Twilight fangirl, I do enjoy messing with it and meshing it with the HP universe. For fear of giving away the plot, I'll say no more. Enjoy the story!

Chapter One

Second Life

Fire. Fire everywhere. Around her. Consuming her. Burning from the depths of her heart to the tips of her hair, so it seemed. Everlasting, eternal fire. What was she? Who was she? Her brain felt like it was a boulder trying to roll uphill: sluggish and faltering. Think think think! Gotta think. Her name… It was Iris. A flower name like her mother's. Her dead mother's. Dead father… godfather… Moony and Tonks and… Fred. So many… So many memories.

Focus! Think! A childhood better left forgotten… Tarnished golden years at Hogwarts… Adventures, loss, Betrayal forgiven… War, more loss… The hunt, battle… So much loss… No more Fred… But Teddy. Always Teddy. Sweet little baby. Godson. Think think think. Shield, organize. Iris mentally grabbed all the memories she could and stuffed them back into place. She didn't try too hard with the earliest ones.

The fire still burned her. She was like a burning log in a summer campfire, charcoal in a furnace. Like she had not only cast fiendfyre but had become a part of it. The fire intensified, particularly around her heart. It was as if a monster had torn it out and was roasting it for dinner. She tried, and failed, to clench her teeth. As the fire kicked up yet another notch, a high, agonized shriek pierced her senses. Who screamed? Was it her? This was a thousand times worse than the cruciatus curse. Worse than dying, even. In the back of her mind, she knew one unavoidable truth. This was the end, in one way or another. There was no miraculous survival on the cards for her. Only eternal fire.

But after a time, the fire in her heart burned out in one last blaze of glory, taking her life with it. She simply lay there for a time, panting air she didn't need. It had a strange, salty taste to it. As Iris inhaled, she became aware of a new kind of fire centered on her throat. Attempting to shove the sensation further back in her mind, she took stock of the world around her.

She knew she was laying down outside by the feeling of hundreds of tiny pebbles pressing into her back. Somehow, even through the shirt she wore, she could feel every last one of them. It was an odd sensation. Iris was reminded suddenly of The Princess and the Pea, a fairy tale she could fuzzily remember hearing as a child.

"_Put me on fifty mattresses_," she thought with some amusement, "_and I'll still feel these pebbles_."

She inhaled through her nose and was shocked at the aroma that invaded her nostrils. There was a strong, salty scent as well as the lingering scent of gasses leaked by various boats. She didn't think that water should have a smell other than salty. But it did. Of fish and their oils, of rusting metal, of general pollution, and dozens of other things. A faint hint of blood lingered in the air over the water. She pushed the burning sensation that flared up again in her throat back the best she could.

Iris listened to the world around her, taking everything in. She could hear the call of an eagle some way off. Not too far from her, water lapped at the shore. It scraped against a million various pebbles and slid gracefully over sandier portions of the beach. She could hear every breath of the waves and how each one was different from the last. Iris figured she was likely hearing the noises of the Puget Sound if she hadn't been taken too far away. Her hearing was a thousand times keener than it ever had been before. A school of fish swam past several hundred yards to her right. A half mile away, she heard the humming engine of an old, creaky fishing vessel and the grumbling of its lone occupant.

Feeling she would be better off standing up, Iris did so. But the speed and fluidity with which she had accomplished the task of standing and turning towards the sound of the water astounded her. The thought had barely formed in her mind before she was there, her tennis shoe clad feet barely disturbing a single pebble, her back no longer feeling hundreds of little bumps. She had always been fast and graceful, so she was told, but never to this extreme.

Finally, mentally bracing herself, Iris opened her eyes only to be assaulted by the riot of colors she could now discern. It didn't matter that it was nighttime, the stars and crescent moon gleaming through openings in the clouds like lanterns attempting to brighten a smoke-filled room. Her vision was as clear as if it were day, though the world around her took on an odd, nocturnal quality with colors she couldn't put a name to. In the back of her mind, she noted that she was no longer wearing her contacts as evidenced by the lack of irritation in her eyes. She rarely wore them for that reason, though they had been in the last she remembered.

She had been correct in that she was outside and on the shore of a great body of water. A foot in front of her, the water expanded outwards: a frothing mix of grays, blues, and greens that were partially transparent to her now superior vision. She was able to catch some things on the earth beneath the waves in shallower water. An old beer can, likely thrown off the side of a ship. Scores of boulders of all the colors and shapes one could fathom in rocks. A few rusty hooks. A bone jutting out from a pile of earth. Even so far under the water, the salty liquid tinted everything so many fascinating shades.

In this way, Iris tried to distract herself from the reality of her situation. She could believe that this was a lovely, yet incredibly vivid, dream tinged with a nightmarish quality at the edge of her consciousness that she would rather not explore. But even as she tried to delude herself, a part of her knew what had happened to her. Not even in a dream could life and the universe be so vivid in sensation. She had never had such a delicate sense of touch before. Her senses of taste and smell had never been so acute as they were now. She had never been able to see clearly without her glasses or contacts, let alone at night. But now, her vision was far beyond human perfect. Her hearing had always been good, though never so sharp and precise, taking in every sound as though it was part of some greater symphony of life. Iris was abruptly brought out of her musings by a silky chuckle from behind her.

"Enjoying the view?" her observer asked of her in a smooth, almost mocking tone of voice.

With a fluidity of movement still surprising to her, Iris whirled around and automatically took a defensive stance. She cursed herself for keeping her wand in the mokeskin bag around her neck instead of in a holster like she should have. But she had been fool enough to think herself safe. She was, after all, thousands of miles away from fans and foes alike. Iris felt the familiar object was still around her neck. However, she didn't feel she had the time to reach for it, dig through it, and draw her wand before she met a sudden end. In desperation, she tried to urge her magic outwards in some way or another. She had done it before, after all.

But with a jolt, she was slapped in the face with a realization. There was nothing. The buzzing and tingling thrum of energy just beneath her skin that she had always known, if only subconsciously, was gone. Her magic had abandoned her. She could feel something else, an unfamiliar wave, ebb, and flow of power. But it was alien to her. In a part of her mind that wasn't gripped by panic, she noted that this new sensation felt right somehow. Like it was meant to be there all along. But she paid that instinct little attention.

She looked up and saw her observer for the first time since her awakening. She could remember his face through the mucky vision that consisted of her memories before this point. He had been tailing her for days, though not close enough for her to see him in any detail. It figures that the one stalker she acquired on her vacation away from home and her rabid fans and groupies would be a bloody vampire. And he had clearly been following her for another reason than her fame and/or fortune.

Her last memory was of confronting her mysterious stalker. It was then that she had seen his face. Though it seemed dull and fuzzy in her memory, she could still compare it to the face she saw through her new eyes. The smooth hair, dark blond, thick, and pin straight. The perfect face, unnaturally pale, features as if chiseled out of marble. The eyes, once hidden behind sunglasses, were no longer covered and were a dark red like dying embers.

"You're the stalker!" She exhaled, her voice quiet. But despite her lack of volume, Iris noticed another change in herself. Her voice was still recognizable. However, it was as though it had been mixed with tinkling wind chimes. That or taken through an audio editor to make it sound beyond beautiful. No voice could naturally sound like hers did.

"If that's how you see me," he sounded amused. Like Iris's soprano, his tenor was inhumanly harmonious and beautiful.

"What… What did you do to me?" the question came out so quietly that no human ears could have discerned it. Her stalker said nothing, simply motioning her to follow him. Reluctantly, Iris did so. What other choice did she have? And really, she was still in too much shock to do much of anything else. It seemed like no time before they had stopped. Her stalker had led her behind a tree to a spot she couldn't have seen when she woke up. Leaning on the trunk was a mirror. With great trepidation, Iris faced it completely and looked into it head on. But it wasn't the Mirror of Erised, showing only what she wanted to see. Instead it showed the cold, hard truth which she could no longer avoid.

Her entire face and body, though similar to what she was used to in many ways, were completely foreign at the same time. It was as if a master artist had found a statue of a young woman carved into a mountain by a bunch of cavemen and then proceeded to completely refine it and polish it until it shone.

The first major detail she noticed about herself was her hair. It was the same in many ways but different somehow. Falling to her elbows in thick waves, Iris felt just calling it "dark red" didn't seem to do it justice anymore. She saw shades in her hair that she never had before. There were many different subtle hues of red. It reminded her in a way of the color the sky sometimes became just before dawn. Dark red, occasionally shot through with lighter shades and a ray or two of gold foretelling a beautiful day. A part of her felt melancholic at the fact that it no longer appeared to her eyes to be the same exact shade of her mother's.

Her body, though still small and petite, looked as though it belonged to a porcelain doll who had been shaped that way on purpose instead of a woman who was simply too small due to a number of hard knocks in life. Any harshness to her appearance had been softened by the transformation. Though she still disliked her size, she felt a little less pathetic somehow.

To her pleasant surprise, many of the scars she had grown familiar with over the years had been wiped from existence. The scar on her left index, for example, had completely vanished. She had gotten that one by nicking it with a knife while slicing celery and carrots when she was eight or nine. She couldn't remember which. However, to Iris's slight irritation, the magically caused scars still remained, albeit faded dramatically. The basilisk scar, the blood quill sentence, and the blasted scar on her forehead were all still there.

Her facial features, mostly inherited from the pureblood aristocrat who had been James Potter, were enhanced as well. The defined, angular shape of her face, sharper edges still softer than her father's had been, seemed to fit her even better now. It didn't seem harsh and bony as she felt it once had, particularly in her younger years. Her skin as a whole was now an unearthly pale, though not the same sickly pallor of Voldemort or the sun-deprived, sallow fair of Snape the potions master. It was as though it had been made out of the same pale, flawless marble as the outside of Gringotts Bank.

Dread knotting her intestines together, or so it seemed, Iris locked eyes with her mirror image. They were still the same, familiar shape. But they, like the rest of her body, had changed in a way she could not undo. The jade green they had always possessed was now gone. The most concrete connection Iris felt she had with her mother had disappeared. Gouging them out, she felt, would have been kinder than this. At least she would always have the comfort that her eyes had never changed, remaining their same glorious green for eternity in her own mind, even after they had long since turned to dust.

Instead, she would have to live with the knowledge that they were now a bright, glowing red. The ironically named irises appeared as though a steady flame surrounding her pupils. Not even gouging them out and setting them alight could cleanse the image from her mind or the truth from her heart and soul. She was no longer a witch, not even human anymore. She could only survive on the blood of others which would be eternally reflected in her pulsing red eyes.

"What did you do to me!" her voice rang out loud and resonant across the small island and over the water as though it were formed from a bitter, icy wind. The slight breeze around the island seemed to speed up, though her stalker paid it no mind. It must surely be a typical gust. They were, after all, on an island.

"**SHE**," her stalking tormentor emphasized in a reverent tone that sickened Iris, "Has made you into something greater. Something more than you could ever have been as a mere human. Love it. Embrace it. You are superior. You are a vampire."

"Why? Tell me why!" the demand burst forth, sharp and piercing, before Iris could filter her mouth. At least that hadn't changed. She thought she saw an angry twitch in her stalker's face before his expression smoothed into one of faked kindness and sincerity.

"**She** saw you would be well-suited for this change. **She **gave you a second life. You now have an eternity to do whatever it is you please. **She **is the reason you now have this opportunity. You should be grateful **she **selected you personally. **She **rarely does so." He explained patiently. Iris noted the emphasis he always put on the word "she", as if it were her actual name. Or perhaps he saw her as a sort of goddess to be worshipped despite the fact that she was clearly a vampire as well.

It seemed likely that he had been turned by her also. Iris figured he hadn't been a vampire terribly long either. Older vampires, she felt, wouldn't follow another of their kind around like a love struck puppy, not even their own mate. As Iris understood it, such bonds were those of equals. Even if an older vampire would allow themselves to be subservient to another, they would likely only give such blind devotion to the one who had, for lack of a better term, created them.

She also didn't miss the fact that he had hinted at there being more vampires created by this mysterious woman. By the way he phrased it, there were quite a few. Iris felt she had her stalker pegged already. He was a loyal lapdog as well as a recruiter for whatever dastardly cause their creator had come up with. On top of that, he clearly had a disgusting infatuation with said creator that went far beyond simple loyalty.

The blindly loyal, Iris knew, were often the most dangerous of followers. Take Bellatrix Lestrange, for instance. The crazy witch was perfectly willing to throw around killing curses like confetti if she heard a single nasty comment against her master or his heritage. So Iris felt she had better play it safe. She would act the scared, confused, ignorant little girl to the best of her ability. He and the unknown creator clearly didn't know who she was which was an unexpected blessing.

"_Just a scared little girl, Iris,_" she internally chanted to herself. "_Just a scared little girl_." And in a way, though not for the reasons her stalker might think, she was.


End file.
